Monthly Archives: July 2014

Polly LaBarre, cofounder of the Management Innovation Exchange (MiX), and former CNN business correspondent and senior editor of Fast Company magazine, talks to Loomio about collaboration, democracy, technology, and the need for a new paradigm based on trust and freedom.

Inspiring Disruptors is a series of interviews with people at the vanguard of a new way of doing things that maximises autonomy and collaboration.

The entire interview is well worth watching. We’ve pulled out some choice quotes below.

What does “collaboration” really mean?

The foundation of all successful collaboration is something very human – trust. More and more organisations are waking up to the power of openness and transparency. The ideology of control – controlling people, controlling information, controlling deviations from the norm – all of that stops collaboration in its tracks.

What is the relationship between organisational change and technology?

Enspiral is a collective made up of individuals and companies that use the tools of business to create scalable social change. It’s mission is to get more people working on stuff that matters.

“Powerful things take place when like minded people connect, we’ve seen this repeatedly, where conversations spark ideas, which become projects, that grow into world changing ventures. Enspiral is a virtual and physical network where this happens.”

Because Enspiral is a collective, meaning no bosses, they’ve had to bootstrap their own collective decision-making system. They found that email was too convoluted for important decisions, and face-to-face meetings too time-consuming. This left just a few people feeling like they were always making the decisions.

Enter Loomio. 18 months ago, Enspiral helped found Loomio, and has been using the tool ever since, to help run this complex boss-less organisation without compromising on effectiveness.

Amanda Palmer is a musician who has built a hugely successful career based on the gift economy. When you go to her webstore, you see that paying for her music is voluntary: if you’re broke – take it. if you love it, come back and kick in later when you have the money.

When Amanda came to New Zealand last year, there was a chain of events that I found pretty amazing, but were seemingly pretty typical in her extraordinary life. She had connected with a local person here in Wellington (through the internet, surprise surprise) who offered to help her put on a show. Before she even landed, there was hype through the whole city (spread, of course, through social media and word of…